Is this the table you want to sit at?
Myths of success have been on my mind recently, as I watch the campus protests against genocide occur alongside the White House Correspondents’ dinner.
How is it possible to hold your nose in a celebration of the First Amendment when young people are being silenced as they exercise their right “peaceably to assemble?” How lost have we become in our proximity to power that we can’t see our own hypocrisy?
Back in 2019, I wrote an article about why women of color are really tired – conditioned to do more with less, competing for crumbs, shaped by a sense of inadequacy. I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that it was around that time I realized what I was trading for “being at the table.” Turns out, I don’t even want to be at a table where I’m drinking champagne while our young people are being brutally attacked by police.
The American project is really f*#*ed up, and has been from its very inception – genocide of Indigenous people, enslavement of Black people, anti-immigrant laws, usurping of land to expand our borders. But we also have a history of protests, radicalism, struggles that lead to change. For that change to occur, we have to question our own complicity – through silence, through passive participation, through glitzy celebration of a status quo. It’s quite literally killing us.
Stay strong,
Sayu